Wait Till the NEXT One!

On the morning that he launched the consumer version of the Vista operating system in New York City last week, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates spoke to NEWSWEEK about it--and he also talked about the version to come.

NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, "Bill, why upgrade to Vista?" what would be your elevator pitch?

BILL GATES: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar [a desktop program with small windows of dynamic content], show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie, and make a little DVD that's got photos. As I went through, they'd think, "Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?"

In many of the Vista reviews, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.

You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. Maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays security guys break the Mac every single day [so your Mac] can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on a Windows machine. So, yes, because of the security stuff, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user-interface-wise.

Is this Vista launch the last hurrah of the big operating system?